Today, a troubled machine. The University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make our civilization
run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.

I talk about many different airplanes in this series.
But I've avoided one -- the World War II Junkers Ju-87, the Stuka dive
bomber. The Stuka has long been a trouble to my mind. Here was a basic
instrument of NAZI Blitzkrieg -- war as lightning attack, war as shock and awe.
The Stuka first saw service in the Spanish Civil War. Then it was used
against Polish civilians in 1939. Early on, it was fitted with a wind-driven siren
that uttered a banshee scream
at maximum dive speed. The NAZIs called it Jericho's Trumpet, and used it to
terrify people below. Of course that soon lost its novelty, while it kept reducing
airspeeds by 15 miles-an-hour. They abandoned the siren.

"Sturzkampfflugzeug" or Stuka, Junkers, Ju 87

But, beyond the Stuka's horrific use, I'm troubled by two design elements:
Airplanes were in the midst of a leap forward; Stukas were yesterday's
news as soon as they flew. They also set up a strange contradiction between
beauty and ugliness.

Germany had bought four primitive
Curtiss dive bombers
in the early 1930s. Those were still old biplanes, but the Germans knew they
were the warplane of the future. A young designer, Hermann Pohlmann, responded
with a series of attempts to build a competitor. By 1937, he'd given the Stuka
its basic form.

Pohlmann was committed to the art deco ideal of simplicity and angularity.
The Stuka had both: It was a low winged monoplane with a fixed landing gear.
Retractable gear would've violated its basic simplicity. Still, teardrop
covers streamlined the wheels. An inverted gull wing dipped down from the
fuselage to where the landing gear attached, then rose again. The wings and
tail were angular, while a large nose spinner began a smooth line from nose
to tail. The result was truly Darth Vadar-ish. People today generally call
it ugly. But I find its functional lines compelling. Of course, I also
think grackles are beautiful birds.

The Stuka was something you might expect to see in the
1930s comic strip Smilin' Jack.
It had that sort of razzle-dazzle, but it was slow and vulnerable. As long
as the Wehrmacht attacked defenseless enemies, the Stuka was devastatingly
effective. Send a typical WW-II fighter up against it and it was doomed.

That's why the Stuka fell from grace during the Battle of Britain. It became
a tool for low-altitude troop support in theaters where there was little allied
air presence. And it made a good training plane. Nevertheless, 6500 were made
while engineers tried to save it with every kind of modification and improvement.

Here in America, we studied the Stuka just as Germany had studied our old Curtiss
biplane. We responded with the similar, but more advanced,
Vultee Vengeance dive
bomber. And, unless you too are old, you may never've heard of the Stuka. But,
for a season, this throwback was the very icon of all that threatened us. And
it was also an echo of 1930s art -- this angular expressionist
woodcut with its fragments of art deco, and just a hint of modern streamlining.

I'm John Lienhard at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.